


Playing Chicken

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-22
Updated: 2013-09-22
Packaged: 2017-12-27 08:49:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/976819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She remembered her mother's funeral as something slightly embarrassing. It had been ostentatious and painfully formal, with a hired choir filling the oratory with boring song and a eulogy read by a serious man in robes she had never seen before; she later found out he had been a higher representative of the Church sent to smooth things over. Everybody in the town was impressed and kept trying to comfort Elisabet by telling her over and over how proud she must be of how important her mother's job was; but a few years later, after the riots and inquiries and trials, when the truth of the Experimental Station became public – Bolvanger, they called it, the fields of evil – and most of the survivors of the fire were imprisoned, the town committee quietly removed Clara Lund's memorial plaque from the wall of the library and installed a new anbaric lantern there instead."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Playing Chicken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SailorSol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SailorSol/gifts).



> Dear SailorSol - you mentioned loving this universe, so I tried to do more of a worldbuilding type thing than focus on familiar characters. Really hope you enjoy it and you're not put off by OCs!

In Oldervik in the winter the nights were so long that for two whole months the sun never made it above the jagged white mountains at all. Elisabet and Sigurðr walked to school in the dark, lit by sturdy anbaric torches that she held in her mittened hands and Sigurðr wore around his neck on a leather collar (for in those days he liked to be a dog, a Saint Bernard or Newfoundland, or sometimes a bear cub, because it gave him an excuse to roll and play in the snow). They ate their midday meals with their classmates in a great wooden hall of chipped old tables and crackling fires, watching the eerie blue twilight through the windows and waiting for Soldagen, the Day of the Sun, when the sky would glow orange and pink with dawn for the first time since November and everybody would be allowed a day off school to dress up and play and eat nice things. Then they walked home in the dark, making up games with their torches where sometimes the beams weren't allowed to cross, and sometimes they were, and sometimes the winner was the one whose light touched the front door first.

Elisabet's eyes and nose and Sigurðr's golden tail were the only things not covered by blankets that night, and if you'd been watching you would have thought that soon there wouldn't be any blankets on the rest of them either with the way they were fighting. Elisabet's feet were kicking at Sigurðr's belly, and his great paws were batting at her clenched fists, although he was careful not to hurt her with his claws. Both of them were shouting, but in whispers.

"There's not enough room!"

"There would be if you lay still!"

"Change smaller!"

She felt it happening and laughed in victory, clutching the slithering furry body close to her chest beneath the blankets as Sigurðr gave up and changed from his lion form into a long-haired Persian cat.

"I thought it'd be warmer," he said grumpily, but softened as soon as she began stroking under his chin with her fingertip.

"It's—" Elisabet started to say, but a crack of light at the edge of her creaking bedroom door made her stop and both of them went still, closing their eyes and feigning sleep as clicking footsteps drew nearer.

"What on earth is all this noise?"

Elisabet felt her mouth twitch, fighting back a smile at her mother's voice. She tried to keep her breathing steady and her eyes still beneath their closed lids, listening carefully to the footsteps.

"It can't be Lis and Sigurðr, I can see they're asleep. It must be... a troll!"

Elisabet heard the door to her wardrobe being flung open and bit her tongue so she wouldn't giggle.

"No, I don't see any trolls, so it must be... a night-ghast!"

With that she grabbed hold of Elisabet's legs through the blankets and Elisabet shrieked with laughter and opened her eyes. Her mother was silhouetted against the light from the open door, but she came to sit on the little stool beside the head of the bed and there was just enough light there to see the soft smile on her face, the way it crinkled the corners of her blue eyes. Her little white terrier dæmon sat down quietly beside the bed and offered his nose to Sigurðr, a blond-furred macaque now, who slipped his paw up from the blankets to pet him hello.

"Mamma, we're too old for this."

The smile slipped very slightly at that, like she no longer meant it. "Not while it keeps making you laugh you're not. I wish you'd stay eleven forever."

It was funny, in a way, and exasperating in a way too. Elisabet's friends seemed almost grown up now. Solveig and Anders went out on the fishing boats with their fathers and got paid for it like proper grown-ups even though they weren't as quick or strong with the nets. Hanne sometimes borrowed her mother's carmine to redden her lips at school, although the mistresses made her rub it off when they saw her. Annelie's chest had started to grow, and at the last solstice feast she'd worn a dress of blue coal-silk that had made her look fifteen. But Elisabet was still dressed in pinafores and ankle socks, still had picture books read to her and beautiful little dolls for her birthdays, was still teased about the troll in the wardrobe even though she'd stopped being frightened by the idea when she was six.

"Not me. I want to be an aeronaut, or a theologian. Maybe even a chaplain."

"Gracious God, child, won't you be happy to marry a fisherman like everybody else?"

Sigurðr's fur bristled at that, and Elisabet pulled a face that made her mother laugh.

"I suppose not. It's such a lot of hard work, though, to become any of those things. Even I'll have to make some sacrifices when I start my new job, and I'm just a nurse."

"What sort of sacrifices?"

Her mother's fingers were rubbing gently at the back of Hallþórr's white head, and she didn't speak for a moment. "Never mind, darling," she finally said, "it's just dull adult things. One day soon maybe I'll bring you on a visit to the Station and somebody cleverer than I can explain it better."

"Can we go in a zeppelin?"

"If you like."

"When are you going?"

"Tomorrow morning."

"For how long."

"Six weeks there, and then home for a week. I shall miss you, Lissie."

"But this is very important work," Elisabet said in a monotone, like chanting responses back in the oratory on Sundays. It seemed like the only thing they'd been talking about for weeks already, this important new job. It made her papa scowl like thunder and mutter things under his breath about how fishing wasn't good enough for Queen Clara any more, and then they always sent Elisabet upstairs so they could fight in private.

She closed her eyes again and felt a shifting on the mattress as her mother leaned forward to kiss her softly on the brow. "Six weeks, darling, then papa and I will take you on a zeppelin to see the circus at Bodø. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

It made her feel six years old again, and that made her stubborn enough not to want to return the kiss, but when she finally fell asleep that night she dreamed of long-lashed elephants and white horses with braided manes and beautiful girls tumbling through the air a hundred feet above her head, and she missed her mother fiercely when she awoke the next morning to an empty, silent house.

* * *

**Three Years Later**

Anders brought his bowl of stew to the end of the long table where Elisabet sat eating her own, reading a book Sigurðr was holding open for her. She looked up at the footsteps and smiled wide – she always smiled when she saw him, because it hid how much he made her stomach flip over – but her smile faltered when she saw how wan his face was, big dark circles beneath his eyes as though he hadn't slept in days.

"Are you ill? You look terrible."

"Thanks very much." He reached down to pick up his dæmon Hlíf, a skinny little fawn-coloured whippet, and lift her onto the bench beside him. She looked awful too, sleepy and quiet although she was usually the liveliest dæmon in the class. Elisabet and Sigurðr exchanged a glance, a silent little conversation, then he closed the book and swung himself to sit on the other side of the table instead, letting Hlíf sniff at his fingers before scratching her gently behind the ears until she rested her chin on the edge of the table with a little sighing whuff noise and closed her eyes.

"Well, you do. You both do."

"We were playing chicken with Aleks and Yngvildr."

"Oh." That explained a lot. She felt like shivering, suddenly, remembering playing that stupid game themselves not long after Sigurðr had settled in his bonobo form: both of them taking steps backward away from each other, smaller and smaller steps as the pain grew and grew before at last they both cried out from the agony and terror of it and flung themselves back together again, Sigurðr whimpering and Elisabet weeping harder than she had since her mother died. She could remember the desperate churning in her stomach – it was like the way Anders made her feel, sick and hot and cold all at once, but worse, so much worse – and the rising, soaring love inside her that felt as though it might shatter her apart like a dropped figurine. _I feel like my heart is breaking_ Sigurðr said in a broken sob, burying his face in her hair and clinging to her with every one of his fingers and toes – but later on that night, whispering together under the blankets, she said _but I've never loved you more than when we sprang together again_ and held his little hands to her pounding heart as they both fell asleep.

"Stupid, isn't it? You can say it."

"Don't you think it's worth the pain for that feeling you get when you're together again?"

Anders shrugged with one shoulder, beginning to look slightly more alive as he ate. "I don't know. We pulled too far, we were showing off. I thought we might rip away altogether. I'm not playing it again." Then his face flushed dark and he put down his spoon, twisting his hand in his scruffy red hair the way he always did when he was nervous or agitated. Beside him, Hlíf's ears were back against her head and she was looking at him sideways, whining quietly between her lips. "Sorry, Lis. My fat mouth again. I shouldn't–"

"It's alright."

Was it alright? Elisabet wasn't sure, really, but either way he hadn't meant to be hurtful so what was the point of making him suffer?

She remembered her mother's funeral as something slightly embarrassing. It had been ostentatious and painfully formal, with a hired choir filling the oratory with boring song and a eulogy read by a serious man in robes she had never seen before; she later found out he had been a higher representative of the Church sent to smooth things over. Everybody in the town was impressed and kept trying to comfort Elisabet by telling her over and over how proud she must be of how important her mother's job was; but a few years later, after the riots and inquiries and trials, when the truth of the Experimental Station became public – Bolvanger, they called it, the fields of evil – and most of the survivors of the fire were imprisoned, the town committee quietly removed Clara Lund's memorial plaque from the wall of the library and installed a new anbaric lantern there instead.

Elisabet said to Anders, "The only time my mamma ever hit me was when we were playing chicken, me and Sigurðr. We were nine, I think – no, ten. We weren't doing it enough to really hurt, just twinge a bit, but you should have seen her face. She was so scared."

Anders looked a bit uneasy himself, glancing around to make sure nobody was close enough to have heard. "Of course she was scared, that's what mothers are for."

"Yes, but you know what her job was, everybody does now. She should have been encouraging it. She should have been helping us if it was so good and important to be apart. She–"

The words faded to silence when Anders put his hand over hers on the table, and Elisabet ducked her head over her bowl of stew, trying to hide the sudden flame in her cheeks with her two black braids.

* * *

**Three Years Later**

By the time Elisabet and Sigurðr were seventeen, the memory of her mother had faded just enough for the pain to be bearable and they decided to clear the attic of her things – but as they were sorting through the trunks of clothes and the rickety shelves of experimental theology textbooks they found an envelope containing three zeppelin passes and three circus tickets dated six years ago. Her knees felt wobbly at the sight of them and she half-fell onto a dusty old suitcase, crying in great ripping, choking sobs against the side of Sigurðr's furry neck and clinging so tightly to him that she could feel in her own body that she was hurting him. When she let him go he helped her tear all the tickets into tiny scraps, then for good measure helped her overturn a bookcase onto the floorboards and helped her scream until they both had headaches.

They calmed after a while, sitting curled together in a torn armchair beneath the skylight window.

"Do you remember those dreams we used to have about the circus?" she whispered. She sounded hoarse and exhausted from all the crying, like she was thirsty and had nothing to drink. "We never did get to go."

"We could go now."

"Papa never would. He's always too busy."

" _We_ could go. On our own. Stowaways on a cargo craft."

The idea made her laugh, and she wiped her running nose on one sleeve and her red eyes on the other. "You'd never stay still long enough to keep us secret, you're always jumping and tumbling around."

"It's your fault. All that circus talk. You were obsessed with those trapeze girls from your picture-books."

It was true, she knew it was. After the fire, after her mother died, that last conversation in her bedroom became a thing to hold on to, like a keepsake locket in her mind. She had always thought she was too old for the circus; after the fire, she could think of nothing else for months and months. The memories rushed back now, and the dreams, intermingled with this complicated muddle of feelings about her mother that had been hidden away inside her until that little brown paper envelope broke the padlock and let it all loose: Love. Hate. Fear. Disgust. Mostly love, despite everything.

"We can do better than running away," Elisabet said. "Come on."

High up in the trees by the inlet near the school there was a rope swing tied fast to a branch. Nobody knew who had put it there; it seemed as though it had been there forever, an eternal meeting-place for children, surrounded by treehouses and burnt patches where the ground had been scraped bare for fires. Elisabet had been too afraid to swing ever since she learned the truth about Bolvanger, always terrified that Sigurðr would lose his grip on her and go plummeting into the sea below, ripped from her forever; now, rash with this suffocation of hatred and love, she stepped onto the branch knotted to the bottom of the rope and pushed off into the open arctic air, holding her hand behind her and trusting that Sigurðr, like always, would take it.


End file.
